Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship's Reviews > VenCo

A disappointing read. This has some fun elements but many others that are shallow, and the plot just needs some work, as the book struggles to keep the tension up and relies heavily on “because otherwise it would break the plot” contrivances.

VenCo is an urban fantasy novel about a witchy road trip. Lucky is a 20-something Canadian working unfulfilling temp jobs and supporting her grandmother Stella, now in the early stages of dementia. When Lucky learns that she’s actually a witch, she and Stella go on a journey to find the final witch for a coven to which Lucky has been invited.

This book has a really slow start, which isn’t a criticism I often make; I don’t care how mundane the stakes are as long as they exist. Unfortunately, here they don’t quite. We spend 60 pages meandering through Lucky’s ordinary life and seeing flashbacks of her dead mom before she ever meets a witch—while Lucky has worries (her apartment building is going to be converted soon, affordable housing is hard to come by), she doesn’t do anything about them and so they don’t rise to the level of plot problems. We’re 100 pages in before Lucky learns that she’s met a witch. And we’re 200 pages in before the quest starts, because the second hundred pages are spent on the witches just hanging out and sharing their backstories, without any particular reason to be concerned for them.

The second half of the book is a little better as there are clear goals to pursue, but the villain is built up as highly dangerous only to come across as tame and easily foiled in his scenes with Lucky. Supposedly if this coven comes together it will somehow solve all the world’s problems—as in our world’s problems, climate change and so on—but how they are supposed to go from scrying and dream-walking (the only powers they seem to have) to saving the world is never addressed. Nor are many other basic questions: why is this particular coven so important, when there are others out there? Why would you make membership in this all-important coven dependent on finding long-lost souvenir spoons? Why is there a deadline on the coven getting together? So many arbitrary, nonsensical plot points ultimately make for an unsatisfying story.

As for the characters, I basically liked Lucky and Stella, and their grandma/grandkid dynamic was probably the best part of the book. There’s not much depth or complexity though—except perhaps in the villain, who is hilariously over-the-top and seduces everyone he meets—and the book introduces a dozen other witches only to give them nothing to do but lots of scenes in which they wring their hands over the progress of Lucky’s quest, while simultaneously failing to warn her about known dangers because they don’t believe in preparedness. Or because the author is terrified that any application of common sense would ruin the plot, I don’t know.

I do think this book will have more appeal to those who love girl power books, which aren’t quite the same as feminist books. While the women here have some power, thematically the book is quite shallow. It goes full-blown war-of-the-sexes, which as it turns out is still a war of the sexes when you include trans people, as all men with magic are apparently evil witch hunters while all the women are “yaaas queen!” Dimaline tries to drag historical witch hunts into this, and just comes across as uninformed—the coven’s base is Salem, where a third of the executed “witches” were men and the accusers girls (which the book definitely does not acknowledge as it would ruin the whole simplistic “history is all about men keeping women down!” line). She also claims that European witch hunts targeted women for being awesome (“smart, or queer, or loud”), rather than, say, old, poor, or mentally ill, which is much closer to the truth, but of course less glamorous and less likely to inspire smug superiority to the benighted past in its readership.

In the end though, I think this book cares more about glamor—for all its brief waving of the anti-capitalist flag, there’s a lot of materialism, a lot of drooling over antique this and bespoke that and attention to the quality of products. A lot of wanting its women to be powerful, without actually doing much, or to make change without making sacrifices; see the vague claim that women taking leadership roles in corporations is in itself “undermining the foundations of colonialism” (skeptics might prefer “selling out”). If you’re looking for nuance or deep thought this is not the book for you.

And it could have worked anyway—it has the makings of a fun, light urban fantasy read. I enjoyed the sheer modernity of it, the up-to-the-moment dialogue and product placement and the sprinkling of humor. With better editing, to tighten up the plot and raise the stakes and make them organic rather than contrived, it might have been great fun. But as is, I can’t recommend.